HUMDRUM

archived
1 Jun – 15 Jun 2005

Campbell Kneale

Campbell Kneale is a Lower Hutt resident whose cross-platform artworks have focused on the everyday mysticism of the New Zealand suburban experience and our mundane connections to 'the divine'.

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Most well known for his 'drone' and 'noise' work under the name Birchville Cat Motel, Kneale has for the last decade successfully fused a combination of late '60s minimalism, lo-fi post rock, the blackest of the black metal, and earthy ethnological drone into shimmering walls of transcendent fuzz and buzz that somehow finds common ground between the humble refrigerator-hum and the universe-resonating shriek of Stockhausen's most bombastic symphonies.

HUMDRUM picked up on many of Kneale's favourite themes, translating them into a physical space. An ever-shuffling collection of glacial drones, cutlery clunks, and mysterious incantations of malfunctioning consumer electronics, recorded around the house and played back in random sequences, that combine into a magical/scientific blur of levitational hocus-pocus. HUMDRUM was the soul-splitting chant of ecstatic boredom.

Campbell Kneale, HUMDRUM, 2005. Image courtesy of Jessica Reid.

Campbell Kneale, HUMDRUM, 2005. Image courtesy of Jessica Reid.